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Saturday, March 11, 2017

Paul Nuttall's website is back: Which claims have been deleted?

Paul Nuttall's website was taken down during the Stoke-on-Trent by-election campaign with the obviously false explanation that it was "undergoing scheduled maintenance",

If it ever comes back on line, you can be sure textual scholars will be comparing the two versions to see exactly what has been deleted.

Well it has reappeared, and some of that work has been done by Marie Le Conte and Paul Curry on BuzzFeed.

What have they found?

The claim that Nuttall has been a university lecturer has been deleted.

This always seemed unlikely to me, but it was repeated without comment by many journalists when Nuttall was elected leader of Ukip.

So to has the claim that Nuttall was a professional footballer, which used to appear on the site several times. Now he claims no more than that he is "a former footballer with Tranmere Rovers youth team".

Finally, the claim that Nuttall was invited to become a board member of the North West Training Council has gone.

This despite the fact that a spokesman for Ukip told the Mirror that the offer had been made when this claim was first questioned.